Looking to set the company on a path to profitability, Super Coffee has named Tyler Ricks as its new CEO with co-founder Jimmy DeCicco moving into the new position of chief brand officer and executive chairman.
Ricks joined Super Coffee as an investor and board member in 2018 before moving to day-to-day operations full-time as the company’s president this past March. He has held a variety of leadership positions at brands over a 25-year career, including as CEO and president of Bagel Brands, CMO and SVP/general manager of Peet’s Coffee, and general manager and SVP of Bear Naked Granola. He is also an active board member at CPG brands Caulipower and KOS Naturals.
In a call with BevNET today, Ricks and DeCicco said the transition aims to open a new path towards profitability at the Austin, Texas-based company, as Ricks’ experience will help to tighten the brand’s strategy around execution and growth as it looks to increase velocities across its existing 50,000 store national footprint and open new channels like club.
According to DeCicco, Ricks was selected as CEO in large part due to his long term working relationship with himself and his brothers, chief revenue officer Jake DeCicco and chief operating officer Jordan DeCicco.
“The thing that you get working with somebody for five years is trust,” DeCicco said. “It’s love, it’s a mutual respect, and you’re not going to get that in an executive search function…. We know Tyler’s background, we trust him as a human being.”
Last year, Super Coffee closed a $106 million Series C funding round, which has helped support the brand’s master distribution agreement with Anheuser-Busch InBev. Looking towards 2023 and an uncertain economic climate, however, DeCicco said the attitude of investors has shifted since the brand was founded in 2015; “When we started Super Coffee, investors valued disruption and innovation more than anything,” he said. “Now, they value profitability [more].”
DeCicco said he is currently working side by side with Ricks to close out the fiscal year as he transitions into the chief executive role, and he will continue to collaborate with Super Coffee’s investors and board members as executive chairman. In the chief brand officer position, he will be responsible for much of the brand’s creative and marketing messaging, but he also intends to oversee internal corporate culture.
According to Ricks, much of his focus as CEO will be on streamlining and improving internal systems and processes, as well as ensuring the company has “the right people in the right seats.”
The company grew to over 100 full-time employees this year and while there aren’t many gaps in Super Coffee’s c-suite and leadership teams, having recently added a new senior brand manager, Ricks said the company will be looking to hire a VP of Finance in the coming months. As well, Chief Commercial Officer Sanjiv Chhatwal has stepped aside from the role but will remain as an advisory board member.
As January approaches, Ricks and DeCicco said the primary goal for 2023 is to increase household penetration and market share. DeCicco said household penetration for the brand is only around 5.5% compared to roughly 50% for bottled coffee overall.
Ricks said that opening up new distribution will be important going forward, with the club channel and expanded ACV in convenience being two of the larger available runways, but improving velocities at existing accounts is paramount. In accounts in the Northeast and North Atlantic regions, he said, the brand has between a 5% to 10% share and he now hopes to push that share higher.
In order to “cut out a lot of noise” and focus primarily on its 12 oz. bottled coffee line, the company discontinued around 20 SKUs this year, DeCicco said, including K-cups, bagged dry coffee, cans and select creamers and flavors. The brand is still moving forward, however, with its Super ENRGY line, which is still in a testing period with distribution at H-E-B stores in Texas and Kroger accounts in the Mid-Atlantic. The energy drink is expected to pass $1 million in revenue this year and may see some scaling in 2023 so long as the company sees signs that it could become “a real player” in the category, he added.
“Our thesis on energy is nobody’s interested in a sub-$100 million dollar energy drink,” DeCicco said. “We want to see if there’s potential for this thing to have a 1% to 2% share of the category over the next few years.”
Super Coffee’s approach to marketing will also evolve in the new year DeCicco said. While the core message around “Positive Energy” will remain the brand’s north star, new tech privacy policies have disrupted the company’s old digital marketing strategy. Instead, the brand is “going to get scrappy again,” and use 2023 as a “test and learn” period with new video marketing through platforms like TikTok and YouTube with a “very targeted and very specific” consumer-facing strategy.
Overall, Ricks and DeCicco said they plan to take a lean and determined approach to growth as a mid-sized company and believe the executive shift underlines “the stability of the brand.”
“I think every year for the last five years, we’ve always said ‘We’re just getting started,’ DeCicco said. “But I think now we really feel it. We’re laying a strong foundation for a business that’s going to be around for a long time.”